Putin's Imaginary Nazis

KYIV—Last Thursday evening, several hundred members of the Ukrainian ultranationalist group Pravy Sector, or Right Sector, attempted to storm the country’s parliament. They were demanding the resignation of the interior minister, whom they held responsible for the death earlier that week of one of their leaders, a notorious man by the name of Sashko Muzychko, who had died in a shootout with police attempting to rein in armed nationalist groups. The previous month, Muzychko brandished a Kalashnikov during a meeting with lawmakers, demanding compensation for the families of victims killed by police during the protests that brought down the government in February. Just days before his death, Muzychko predicted his demise on TV, accusing the post-revolutionary Ukrainian government of working in collaboration with the much-hated Russians to quell nationalist movements such as his own.

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Earlier that day, I had interviewed the interior minister, Arsen Avakov. He pleaded with members of Right Sector to give up their weapons, many of which they had stolen from an arms depot during the heat of last month’s uprising. If they truly believed in defending their country from attack, he said, they should join the country’s army. “Go to the border regions in Ukraine and secure Ukraine,” he urged. The group has been reluctant to heed these warnings, however, saying that, particularly in the face of a potential Russian invasion, the country should adopt a Swiss-style gun control policy, in which every household is armed in case of foreign attack.

To hear Vladimir Putin tell it, Right Sector – along with the nationalist political party Svoboda – was the main force behind the revolution last month ousting pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, and is now the power calling the shots in Ukraine. Moscow cited the alleged role of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism in the revolution, and the new government’s hostility toward ethnic Russians, to justify its annexation of Crimea. “Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup,” Putin stated flatly in his speech to the Russian Federation Council on March 18. “They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.” Various American pundits, on both the left and right, have essentially repeated this line to discourage American support for Ukraine’s new government.

To be sure, Right Sector’s ideology and tactics are not those of liberal democrats. But if Right Sector was truly “set[ting] the tone in Ukraine,” presumably it would not be trying to storm the parliament building demanding the resignation of a key government minister. If it had actually “executed” a “coup,” it would be in control of the country’s armed forces, rather than refuse to be integrated into it.

Right Sector, a coalition of nationalist groups that surprised most close observers of Ukrainian politics with its quick emergence as a self-defense force during the EuroMaidan protests, has earned an inordinate amount of press attention over the past several months. This is partly due to the group’s demeanor and physical presence; burly men dressed in black roaming the streets of Kiev with baseball bats and knives make for a much sexier story than the incomprehensible machinations and backroom dealings that otherwise characterize Ukraine’s labyrinthine political space.

But Right Sector has also made headlines because of a concerted Russian propaganda campaign to tar the revolution as the work of violent, radical nationalists. What might have started out as a well-intentioned reaction to Yanukovych’s rejecting a trade package with the European Union, these critics say, was swiftly overtaken by “fascists” of various stripes. This is far from the truth.

To begin with, and this is meant as no defense of the organization, it is lazy to label Right Sector “fascist.” In an interview with Newsweek, the group’s leader, Dmitry Yarosh, claimed that 40 percent of its members are Russian speakers and that “Jews and other nationals feel comfortable in our forces.” In early March, Yarosh met with the Israeli ambassador to Kiev, who later posted on the embassy’s website that “Yarosh stressed that Right Sector will oppose all [racist] phenomena, especially anti-Semitism, with all legitimate means.” The group’s anti-Russian ideology does not automatically translate into a pro-European stance; it opposes homosexuality and abortion and fears that closer integration with Europe – the clarion call of the early Maidan movement – will weaken Ukraine’s independence. That said, there is no evidence that the group is responsible for any sort of hate crimes against the country’s minority groups. Artem Soropadsky, the group’s spokesman, insists to me that, “we are not fascists or Nazis but nationalists.”

Nationalists they are. But Right Sector tends to emphasize the preservation and propagation of the Ukrainian language (Yarosh is himself a former language teacher), rather than the denigration of minority groups. In an interview with a Ukrainian newspaper, Yarosh sounded downright sentimental describing the diversity of people who participated in the movement to overthrow Yanukovych, and he was at pains to distance himself from Svoboda’s overt xenophobia. “I don’t understand certain racist things they share, I absolutely don’t accept them. A Belarusian died for Ukraine, and an Armenian from Dnipropetrovsk died for Ukraine,” he said.